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Comment by pimlottc | Hacker News Reader

That's... bizarre. They didn't make the animation non-skeuomorphic, they just switched to a different and very weird skeuomorphism that has nothing to do with how actual books work. It's worse than if they had just made it completely flat.

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> They didn't make the animation non-skeuomorphic,.......that has nothing to do with how actual books work.

Then it is non-skeuomorphic.

And they have been removing it bit by bit since they kicked out Scott Forstall.

One wonders if Forstall would be the Jobs type figure to return to on the back of a white horse aquihire should Apple ever fall into dire straits again.

I don’t think he’s actually working anywhere that could be bought, though.

It’s not skeuomorphic to books but it does replicate (sort of) what it might look like if a book were printed out a stack on index cards. The shading and the motion is definitely meant to make it feel like a physical object moving.

Isn’t that exactly how most modern websites are designed? Like look at Google’s Material design. UIs are basically cards sliding around the screen.

> it does replicate (sort of) what it might look like if a book were printed out a stack on index cards.

Except with a stack of cards (or pages) the bottom page would not be moving. The visual is more reminiscent of some sort of assembly / processing line.

It often seems like the only reason many companies constantly update design is because they have design departments that need to do something.

Absolutely. And they could at least leave the previous animation as an option. Why punish loyal users? Maybe it's also just to show who's boss.

It is trendy right now to add superfluous animation to delight the user. In this case, they decided to slide in the next page at a different rate than the previous page. It is worse than before because we can't really start reading until we fully turn the page.

I wish they would tone down and or remove all skeuomorphic and animations across all of macOS iOS and iPadOS. They are distracting to me and I usually turn them off in the accessibility settings.

Sounds like Apple gave you a way to solve your problem. Personally, I like the animations, but I'm glad users have the option to turn them on and off as they wish.

The problem is that switch is global on iOS. I don't want to remove all animations, just some of them. Android has the same problem here: I want to disable many animations because I find them annoying and intrusive, but some critical animations like loading spinners break when animations are disabled, so I do the next best thing and increase the speed.

At least iOS lets you change the font size for each application independently, which is a feature that I make heavy use of. I like larger fonts, but sometimes this results in text being truncated too early, and being able to selectively reduce the font size makes it feasible to have a larger default font size. For whatever reason this is not possible on Android, and changing the font size takes several seconds to kick in, so even manually boosting the font size for certain cases via a shortcut or automation is annoying.

I think it makes sense to have the page turn process take a little time and have a little bit of visual transition. Our visual processing system isn't great at knowing whether a new screen of text has been loaded, especially, if we're blinking when it happens. Having a brief animation helps us know that yes, you did just tap the edge of the screen, and accordingly the page has been turned.

You can turn most of them off. That said most of us would prefer more skeuomorphic UIs

Worst of all is how the following page inexplicably has a rather dark gray filter applied to it until it's fully visible. Just awful.

Ah, thanks, I knew something was frustrating me as it appears.

I'm gonna shill for apple and say that this is probably an oversight. Something that has been around for years and everyone expects to work as such that fell out of QA testing. Hopefully they bring it back after realizing their slipup.

That being said, I've used Kindle for years because it's online etc. They have had this same feature for years on their mobile versions so I don't get how this was a killer feature of Books.

The Apple Books version wasn't just a static animation—you could partially flip the page, flip it back, make just the corner flip up a little then push it back in place, et c., all with smooth and responsive enough operation that it was close-enough to feeling like a real, physical thing. The "back" of the page, as it flipped, showed the text from the front as if it were showing through thin paper, it wasn't just blank. Lots of apps have page flip animations but most of them are both non-interactive and bad. Apple's was interactive and good. Dunno if Kindle's is as good—I used it long ago and my recollection was a slow, ugly, non-interactive page flip animation, but it may have changed since then.

[EDIT] Two key real-book-reading behaviors this enabled, that a non-interactive page flip animation (which I personally find a ton worse than no animation) does not:

1) You could "play" with the corner and edge of the page while reading. Great for fidgeters, and analogous to what some of us do when reading real books.

2) You could start to flip the page as you were nearing the end of the current page.

Kindle's animation is pretty good, and I did that fidgeting thing with it all the time. I've never experienced the stuttering on Android that the OP has on iOS. It also shows the text bleeding through the back side of the page.

But the animation is disabled by default and lately I've stuck with the regular sliding animation because it's faster and much less obtrusive. It also lets you start turning the page as you're reading the last line.

I disagree that something like this could have been an oversight. A designer spent time coming up with the new animation, it was approved by somebody in a project management role, and engineers had to spend time implementing the new feature.

Apple has an intense culture of dogfooding, so it would surprise me very much if someone in a leadership position didn't experience the new page-flipping animation, much less explicitly approve its design.

> fell out of QA testing

That’s not really a change you miss if you do any QA of that app at all. And if it was missed that’s even worse for Apple than if it was a conscious choice.

I’m trying to imagine QA testing that doesn’t ever actually turn the page

My shill for Apple here is that the simple sliding animation is much better. I never liked that book animation. It felt heavy and distracting and out of place like most skeuomorphism.

It wasn't just skeuomorphic, it had a functional component. It helped you keep your place and maintain context as you turned the page, just as you'd do with your finger while reading a real book.

No one has ever designed a physical book that works anything like the new page-turning approach, and you have to believe there's a reason for that.

It's very clearly a choice and not a bug

But what I could imagine is that it fell out of product oversight and an engineer just came along and said "well that's a really complicated piece of code, I don't want to maintain that, I'll replace it with something simple", and nobody pushed back because this isn't a high-priority feature any more

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